Legonaut!?!?

Toughened Glass

"It is an extremely high quality material and really durable. It's paper thin - like literally the same thickness as a piece of paper - and totally see-through. I would say zero per cent opacity,"

So...toughened glass is both (a) tough, (b) transparent (sapphire glass has been around for years and years) but because it's associated with an Apple product he feels the need to get all tumescent about it.

RE: I ain't Spartacus

Back in my past

I remember when I was working at a place where temp contracted labour such as myself definitely had second-class citizen status...and I also remember the moment when I realised that contracted labour such as myself wasn't constrained in the same way as staffers.

Annoying boss: We're busy doing staffy things - go and make tea

Me: OK. [Exit stage left ]

< some time later >

Me: [Enter stage left, bearing tea] Tea's up

Annoying boss: <Splutter> Yuk! You've put loads of sugar in this

Me: I used my initiative - you look kind of overweight, so I assumed you'd want a few spoonfuls in there.

but also...

throwing away

Sorry if I've missed the logic here, but if I've thrown something away, why would I want another.

If I've tried the lastet new-and-improved food product, hated the taste and thrown it in the bin, I'd be a bit miffed if Gricery Fairy took it upon itself to get me another in the next load of shopping

Re: The Answer Is Under Our Noses

There was an interesting video on the VSauce channel on YouTube a while ago which briefly discussed supermarkets' analysis of buying patterns. It went something along the lines of....

Guy gets his monthly pack of discount vouchers from the store, and this time around it includes coupons for things like nappies (diapers, for our transatlantic chums) for no apparent reason.

It then transpired that there'd been purchases against that store loyalty card for things like unperfumed soap (instead of the normal scented variety) and a few other things. The big number crunching computer at the supermarket recognised that as a trend common to newly-expectant mothers, and so assumed that it was time to start offering them attractively-priced baby goods.

Then his teenage daughter had to 'fess up that she was in Le Club de Pudding.

What's the difference...

Re: Why are we getting worked up about this?

Maybe patents should be a bit like planning permission - once granted, you need to do something with it, or else it lapses. That opens up the way from someone else to then do something to take the concept forward *within a reasonable timeframe* rather than the current position which seems more like "I've patented it and won't do anything with it, and you can't do anything about it"

mobile vs desktop

Personally I use the mobile site from my desktop, as I'm fed up with the flashy advert heavy content on the desktop site dragging my machine's performance down...is the move in the new mobile site towards more adverts? I hope not, as it could take me back to square one

Re: Tesco.

I've been in my local Tesco late in the evening when they put the stuff out on the reduced shelves. Loads of people hovering suddenly turned and pounced on the poor lackey trying to load the shelves from his cart. It reminded me of the sort of thing you see in movies when someone chucks some live bait into a pool full of piranhas

txt spEk

As your first paragraph ably demonstrates, with the proliferation of txt speak, pretty much every SMS I get these days appears to be encrypted. Couple that with a predictive text faux pas here and there, and the content is as unreadable as anything that's been through a military grade encryption system.

More than Mole

Reading this obit (and others today) you'd be forgiven for thinking that Adrian Mole had died, rather than his creator. Yes, the Adrian Mole books are the most well-known books by Sue Townsend, but she wrote more than just those...yet the non-Mole stuff hardly seems to get a mention. Take "The Queen and I"...superb story but, like the rest of her output, it's going un-noted

value of intellectual property

" The project, called BULLRUN by the NSA and EDGEHILL by the British spies at GCHQ (named after the first battle in both countries' respective civil wars) meant that anyone with sufficient resources could crack the encryption and destroy the value of intellectual property"

But this would be a Good Thing wouldn't it? At least it would seem to be, based on the number of comments one reads online from freetards demanding that information be free and saying that hoarding of intellectual property is a Bad Thing.

browser restrictions

"Apple don't allow other browsers the same access to the rendering engine as Safari has, and lock down their usage so they can't improve their rendering speed much (it's why Firefox wont release an iOS version). This means Safari is the best web browser for iOS out there in terms of both quality of rendering pages and in terms of the speed it does that rendering!"

I hadn't realised Apple were that restrictive. Does that not count as restrictive anti-competitive practise...the sort of thing that gets companies sued?

Re: RE: service charge

"If you're a professional who can't find something else to be doing with that multitasking computer you're sat in front of, whilst the Firefox installer does its thing, you shouldn't be getting paid anything, by anyone."

Yeah...cos when you're getting paid contractor rates to sit in a client's office and do the work they're paying you top coin for, there's nothing the client likes more than for you to not work on the job in hand and to p*** about setting up software on your own machine

RE: service charge

Good point, and pretty much what I was thinking.

The software itself may well be free, but Dell are providing an employee to do the install. That employee requires a wage, and on top of that they have direct financial demands on the employer (employer's NI contribution, pension contribution, etc.) on top of their salary. And they'll require the tools to let them do their job....things like a chair and desk, etc.

Before you say "but they'd have that anyway" remember that if they weren't installing Firefox they'd be doing other work...other work which is currently being done by someone else, who brings with them their own overhead cost.

If your time is sufficiently low-value, then sure you can spend 10 minutes installing Firefox yourself. But if you're a professional, working at professional contract rates, then that 10 minutes of not working/earning could easily cost you in excess of the £16-odd that Dell are asking for.

wheels

Freetards

To all of those whinging about the new changes and the adverts....get a grip. This is a free service. Do you have any idea how much it costs to source, manage and serve the mapping data, to develop and distribute the app, etc.?

I'm not a Google apologist, just a realist. If I pay for something, and the person I'm paying then screws around with what I've paid for, then I can complain. But if someone gives me something for free, at expense to them, I'm not really in a position to claim that I'm hard done by if they change it in a way I don't like.

Re: Excellent news

"Although, im not sure one of his other main goals, eradicating maleria in Africa is such a good idea, its great for controlling population growth in an environment that can barely sustain the people at the moment, let alone support the million plus that are offed by the pathogen every year."

Interesting thinking. Following that logic, seeing as London seems to be getting a bit over-crowded, maybe it's time to re-introduce cholera to the water supply?

Re: Phablet calling

Re: Phablet calling

I meant "fact" as in I have seen figures based on actual research carried out by professional/specialist research companies, as opposed to some biased personal opinion that I'd just pulled out of my arse

Phablet calling

While most of us would feel that we'd look a bit daft holding a phablet-like device to our ear to make a call, I reckon the fanbois will lap this up....another way to draw attention to themselves and the fact that they have the latest iDevice.

[ fact - based on professional experience in this area - the iPhone has the biggest ratio of perceived market presence to actual market presence. Android, BB, etc, users have a "smartphone" and say things like "I need to make a call" or "I'll look that up on my phone".....Apple fanbois have "and iPhone" and say "I'll need to make a call on my iPhone" or "I'll get my iPhone and look that up". Consequently, there's a perception that there are a lot more iPhone users out there than there actually are, just because they keep banging on about the iPhone so much, whereas users of other platforms just get on with it ]

Books

"Until sometime in the early 1980s, when you reached secondary school you were handed a slim book full of numbers during a maths lesson and taught how to use log tables. Sines, cosines, tangents, square roots - they were all in there too"

I remember that lesson well. Towards the end, one of the girls in the class started crying...when asked what was the matter, she replied "I'll never be able to memorise all of these!"